OS3G - Open Source, 3rd Generation

A (humble) attempt to publish news from the trenches where Free/Libre/Open-Source Software is brought to the mainstream -- and Francois Letellier's blog, too

Wednesday, April 05, 2006

ObjectWeb Architecture Meeting - cont'd

Roland Balter gave an overview and status of the ObjectWeb RFID initiative.

Tom Rose & Ron Rose presented (remotely) the Singularity RFID/Sensor Integration Platform. Singularity supported by the i-konect company (and consortium First Open) under development for 1 year. In their architecture, they implemented EPM, EPC-IS not yet implemented. i-konnect's business model assumes that middleware is becoming commodity very quickly. Specific applications are to be the vertical/commercial ones. They intend OSS to accelerate adoption. The service component bus is based on JINI, their JMS transport is JBoss'.

Humberto Moran (Open Source Innovation) delivered a presentation focused on social implications of RFID. RFID has scores of industrial applications, benefits for consumers, etc. Humberto advises to read "Spychips" to whomever is serious about doing RFID. Is RFID creating an orwelian society? A major peril of RFID is privacy violation. Humberto makes the very important point that those who create technology should know how the technology they create will affect society. Concept of "watching the watchers", in a "Trasparent Society". This has a lot to do with open source. Privacy invasion: interactive marketing, finding oneself in the news, difficulties finding a job, denial of service, targeted robbery... One has the right to forget the past - everybody has skeleton in the closet. Whilst developed economies may cope with RFID, this technology can be used by authorotarian governments to create orwelian societies and perpetuate their power. In the long term, this will impact immigration ecological impact, human rights abuses. Drivers of privacy invasion are flexibility of use, pervasiveness, connectivity and functionality (capabilities). Why some technologies do not develop in the best possible way? Because of market failures, technology failures and social/political failures. Privacy is slowly disappearing as a natural right. Humberto proposes the creation os a privacy-friendly internet of things. The best way to protect sensitive data is not to create it in the first place! It's software (middleware amongst other things) that creates the links between data - this is the place where relations are made. So that noone can tamper with privacy friendly software is make it open source. Humberto proposes the concept of "privacy friendly" goods, the same way as one can chose organis or fair trade.

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